Should UGC regulate foreign varsities?

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Dec 08, 2006, 12.34 AM IST

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Amrik SinghEx-Vice ChancellorPunjabi University

Assessment and accreditation are a must

Most of the foreign universities operating in India are not all that good in terms of quality. But they carry a label which sells in the Indian market. How to deal with this problem is an issue that requires to be dealt with in a manner which is in accordance with the WTO requirements. For one thing, quality has to be ensured. For another, equity has to be given its due. The only way in which these two requirements can be met are if someone in India is given the responsibility for assessing the standing and performance of the institutions which venture out to India.

Indian economy might have freed itself to some extent from the neo-colonial bind. But can the same thing be said about higher education? The truth of the matter is that, for reasons which cannot be gone into here, the neo-colonial grip has got further strengthened.

Because of its long standing and reach, the UGC is generally projected as the appropriate academic agency for doing this job. No other agency is better suited for the purpose except that, wherever any professional matter is concerned, consultation with the relevant professional body would be in order, indeed desirable. The AICTE is one obvious agency for this purpose of consultation but other professional agencies can also be involved. It is not necessary to go into the details of how they will undertake the job. What NAAC is doing is only one precedent.

Having said this, it requires to be added that even though NAAC has done a good job, the twin principle of assessment and accreditation needs to be pushed much further. Both the leading professional bodies (AICTE and the medical council) are unbelievably slow, patchy in their operations and far from exacting in the implementation of what they prescribe.

The need of the hour is to bring the various professional bodies on the same platform as was underlined by the 1986 Policy on Education. It is a reflection on government working that this recommendation has not been acted upon so far. One of the outcomes of this current controversy should be to do what has been neglected for two decades.

Ajit MohantyProfessor, ZHCES,* JNU

Regulations are essential to ensure quality

The twisted logic of liberalisation is untenable and dangerous if extended blindly to education. Open markets may, under certain conditions, and arguably, ensure better quality, competitive prices and choice to the consumers who are not a part of the system of production. But the education sector is fundamentally different because students form an integral part of the system the quality of which affects them; they are ‘prosumers’ not consumers. Unregulated competition in education does not lead to better quality; it distributes quality unevenly.

Rich Indian students spend over $3 billion annually on education abroad; they will spend much more opting for ‘foreign’ institutions back home. The more they do so, the poorer will be the quality of other ‘public’ institutions, since the standard of such institutions — IITs, IIMs and quality Indian Universities — is linked to student quality.

High-cost, low-quality foreign educational shops must be regulated, as CNR Rao committee recommends, preventing unscrupulous fly-by-night operations and commercial franchising of offshore study centres. Foreign institutions do not rush in just to fulfil a social responsibility with philanthropic motives. They come to grab the opportunity to ‘commodify’ education for profit.

Limiting the right of foreign institutions to repatriate surplus is not a sufficient safeguard against covert profit-making objectives, part of which may be spotting, preparing and luring quality students for more specialised higher education abroad. Instead of stemming the outflow of students, open educational market may add to it, generating new demands through clever manipulative marketing strategies.

Unregulated, foreign institutions will monopolise and impoverish our educational institutions by snatching the cream of domestic student population (and teaching faculty) resulting in an uneven distribution of quality. Open market in education sector is not ‘free’ market; regulations are a must.